The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700

By Adam J. Davis

Since its original publication in 1975, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century has become an important teaching tool and research volume. Warren Billings brings together more than 200 period documents, organized topically, with each chapter introduced by an interpretive essay. Topics include the settlement of Jamestown, the evolution of government and the structure of society, forced labor, the economy, Indian-Anglo relations, and Bacon's Rebellion. This revised, expanded, and updated edition adds approximately 30 additional documents, extending the chronological reach to 1700. Freshly rethought chapter introductions and suggested readings incorporate the vast scholarship of the past 30 years. New illustrations of seventeenth-century artifacts and buildings enrich the texts with recent archaeological findings. With these enhancements, and a full index, students, scholars, and those interested in early Virginia will find these documents even more enlightening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807838822

Book preview

1 THE BEGINNINGS

A seafaring people, the English nonetheless lagged behind other Europeans who raced to set up colonies along the Atlantic rim of Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. That is not to say they were uninterested in foreign enterprises. Indeed, Bristolians traded with Icelanders as early as the 1430s, and half a century later Bristol fishermen were already working the cod-rich waters off Newfoundland and routinely putting ashore to salt their catches. Their experience of the cold, forbidding coast of North America may well explain why Henry VII refused to open his tight fist for Bartholomew Columbus when the Italian tried to get the crown’s backing for his brother’s voyage of discovery. Henry had a change of heart after Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies under the Spanish flag, and he sent John Cabot westward in 1497 to stake out an English claim to the New World.

Other English adventurers sailed in Cabot’s wake, but interest in America waned by Henry VIII’s day, because Newfoundland seemed so menacing and so devoid of worthwhile commodities apart from codfish, but there were other reasons. Warring with the Scots, the Irish, and the French sapped interest in exploration. Henry’s break with the Church of Rome threw the kingdom into sharp, ofttimes bloody broils that did not go still until the accession of Elizabeth I.

During her long reign (1558–1603) the Virgin Queen not only abated religious strife, but her statecraft afforded a setting in which her subjects could point their creative energies in new directions. So it is hardly surprising that Elizabethans looked to the Atlantic and started harboring tastes for an English presence in America. Whetting their appetites the more were rousing tales of vast treasures from the Spanish Indies, unusual plants and animals from Africa or the Orient, and exotic people, who neither dressed nor talked like Europeans, nor worshipped a Christian God, and, oddest of all, who were not white like the English. Men such as John Dee, Richard Eden, Thomas Frampton, and the two Richard Hakluyts saw more in those stories than just fables about strange lands and curious peoples. England, they thought, should grab its fair share of the manifold bounties these new worlds offered, and they ceaselessly promoted the idea of English colonization of the Americas—none more so than Richard Hakluyt (the younger), who gave a lifetime to publicizing the value of colonies to the nation.

MAP 1

Among the first to heed Hakluyt’s call were courtiers who looked to the queen for not only her royal sanction but funds from the crown’s coffers. (She ventured the one readily enough, but rarely the other.) In the 1570s both Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Humphrey Gilbert tried unsuccessfully to found settlements on the far northern coast of America. Confident he could succeed where Frobisher and Gilbert had faltered, Sir Walter Ralegh took up the challenge. Wealthier and better informed than his predecessors, and closer to Elizabeth too, Ralegh picked a more southerly spot as the site for his enterprise. Three times he tried, and three times he failed to plant a settlement on the coast of present-day North Carolina, which he named Virginia after Elizabeth.

Ralegh’s third attempt coincided with the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War of 1588–1604, and, while the fighting dragged on, the hope of erecting English colonies in Sir Walter’s Virginia languished. Hakluyt kept the vision alive. Indeed, he succeeded in something he had not before: he persuaded the merchants to take up colonization. The merchants had shied away from colonial ventures in the past because they regarded them as the follies of courtiers and of no commercial benefit. Now Hakluyt convinced them by linking the need for colonies to a more general effort to increase trade and to spread an English presence around the globe.

Spurred by the return of peace in 1604, a group of well-connected merchants and public men from London and Plymouth solicited their new king, James I, for letters patent authorizing them to colonize in America. More than a year elapsed before the solicitations bore fruit; finally, on April 10, 1606, the petitioners got their charter. James’s gift authorized the creation of two companies to settle Virginia—one based in London, the other in Plymouth. It defined Virginia as the territory between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of north latitude, or all the land between Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine and the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. This vast territory would be divided between the two companies, with the Plymouth investors exploiting the northern part and the London corporation planting the southern region. In addition to describing the territorial limits, the charter provided a detailed explanation of how settlement should be undertaken, placed the responsibility for governing each colony in the hands of resident councils, and made the local officers answerable to a royally appointed council that remained in England.

Some of the reasons for the colonizing venture may be drawn from the charter, but other explicit statements of purpose are to be found in the promotional literature that preceded and followed the charter’s promulgation. An expansion of trade, a duplication of Spanish successes in the Indies, the need to acquire colonies as sources of supply, profit for investors and colonists, the furtherance of Protestantism—all of these and other reasons were put forward as the rationale for planting English footholds in America (Document 1).

Attaining such ends depended upon the proper organization, financing, and management of a colonial venture, things that earlier undertakings had always lacked. To avoid the failures of the past, the patentees of 1606, especially the Londoners, drew from their own experiences of world commerce the chartered trading company as the model for managing their enterprise. The trading company minimized the financial risk to large and small investors alike. It also allowed for the gamble of service as well as capital, which meant that adventurers who had no money but who were willing to barter their labor for a share of the profits could perform a vital role in the operation. Finally, the trading company could bring together the talents and know-how of specialists, providing thereby a fund of information and skills that could lengthen the odds of success.

Armed with the charter, high purpose, and means, the Londoners began preparations for an attempt to settle their part of Virginia. Over the summer and fall of 1606 they marshaled money, supplies, colonists, and ships. The exact amount and types of stores they raised are unknown, because no record of the goods that shipped with the first settlers has survived. Some idea of the sorts of things that the company deemed necessary to sustain life during the early phases of colonization may be deduced, however, from an inventory that a Virginia publicist, the Reverend Samuel Purchas, compiled in the early 1620s (Document 2). Recoveries from modern archaeological digs at Jamestown are equally instructive. More than a million artifacts have been found at the site of the first settlement, and most of them date from the period 1607–1610. From a material standpoint, they suggest that backers and colonists alike had a more sophisticated understanding of the challenges before them and were better prepared than scholars have generally supposed.

If one is to judge from the list of recruits (Document 3), in choosing their first complement of colonists, company officials intended to send an exploratory expedition to America. Ralegh had mounted a similar expedition in 1585, which likely conditioned the investors’ thinking. Of equal significance was the advice of those shareholders who had soldiered on the Continent or tried to colonize Ireland. They would have favored an initial settlement of men and boys based in a palisaded village akin to martial encampments in the Low Countries or fortified towns that had proven effective in the conquest of northern Ireland. The intended exploratory nature of the undertaking seems confirmed by the additional instructions (Document 4) and newly uncovered archaeological evidence.

At length all was in readiness. On December 20, 1606, three ships carrying one hundred men and four boys commanded by Admiral Christopher Newport, an old hand in the exploration of the North American coast, slipped their moorings and dropped down the Thames for Virginia. Six weeks of contrary winds kept the little convoy in sight of England, but, when the breeze shifted, the ships sailed to the Canary Islands, where the adventurers took on fresh water. Then, following a westerly course, the fleet made for the West Indies, arriving off Martinique late in March. After three weeks of rest in the islands, the colonists sailed north until they raised the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. On April 26 they put ashore a landing party and then spent the next seventeen days scouting for a place to settle. Two weeks later they had worked their ships up a river, which they called James, until they came upon a pear-shaped, almost island that a narrow peninsula joined to the river’s north shore. Anchoring there on May 13, they named the place Jamestown and set about building a fort and housing.

Within a matter of weeks, Admiral Newport, believing all was sufficiently well in hand, weighed anchor for England to fetch additional stores and colonists. Appearances deceived. While sound from a defensive point of view, Jamestown Island had no source of potable water, and its marshy landscape bred great clouds of flies and mosquitos that feasted greedily upon warmblooded flesh. Clearing the land scared off the native animals, and prolonged drought withered the edible plants. The sultry heat of a Virginia summer and skirmishes with the Indians consumed both supplies and colonists at rates faster than anyone in London or Jamestown had imagined. Neither the leaders, whom the company had drawn from the genteel ranks of English society, nor the artisans and craftsmen, upon whom the company depended to exploit the new land’s expected bounty, could cope. Men died at an appalling rate, carried off, in George Percy’s words, by diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine (Document 5). When Newport returned with the so-called First Supply of food and men in September, only 37 of the original 104 colonists were still alive.

PLATE 1. James Fort. Composite image representing features from about the first decade of the colony. Courtesy of APVA Preservation Virginia

Other difficulties arose from a confusion in the colony’s management and the inability of the settlers to find commodities that had markets in England. Captain John Smith became the center of controversy when his colleagues banned him from his seat on the resident council. This and quarrels over what to explore, what to plant, and where to trade soon demonstrated the company’s error in dividing political authority between London and Jamestown. In addition, the reality of the situation failed to conform to the colonists’ hopes of what Virginia would offer them. The Indians proved unfriendly. They too suffered from the drought—the worst in seven centuries, as we now know—and they were decidedly unwilling to share their limited stores of corn or other foodstuffs. Then, too, the natives disappointed the English. Not only were they dangerous and uncooperative, but they seemingly lacked the cultural attainments and the wealth of the indigenous peoples in the Spanish Indies. There were neither gold mines nor the passage to the Orient. These impedimenta appeared to frustrate the dream of eventually turning Virginia into a prosperous colony (Document 6).

Only the emergence of John Smith as the colony’s leader and a redoubled effort by the company to infuse more men and supplies into the venture spared the colony from collapse. Until burns from a gunpowder explosion forced him to return to England in the summer of 1609, Smith kept the colony together. After his assumption of the council presidency in September 1608, he restored quieter relations with the Indians. At the same time, he made progress in bettering living conditions at Jamestown and stockpiling food supplies. As a consequence of his forceful leadership, the colony passed the winter of 1608–1609 in comparative ease. Despite the improvements he had wrought, Smith could not solve the colony’s basic problem—the need to discover some means by which the undertaking could be made profitable for its investors.

In an effort to resuscitate its flagging fortunes, the Virginia Company secured from the crown new letters patent that completely reorganized the entire operation. Along with creating a more centralized and efficient government for the colony, the Charter of 1609 turned the company into a joint-stock venture. The sale of corporate stock would give the company a new, much-needed source of capital (Document 7).

Reorganizing the Virginia Company aroused new interest and hope in the future of the enterprise, but, ironically, the colony almost failed as a result of the company’s efforts. By the late spring of 1609 company officials raised a supply of five hundred colonists and nine ships and sent them to America. At sea, plague and bad weather beset the convoy. A hurricane cut off the ship of the deputy governor, Sir Thomas Gates, and it wrecked on the Bermuda coast. When four hundred leaderless survivors straggled into Jamestown in late summer, they were too sick to be of much use, but they quickly ate the limited stores of food. That gone, the entire colony fell victim to disease and famine as winter set in. Between October 1609 and March 1610, the colony’s population dropped from five hundred to about sixty people (Document 8). So severe had the starving time been that, when spring came, the survivors decided to give up and go home. Only the timely arrival of the governor, Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, and new colonists saved Virginia from collapse.

Although the winter of 1609–1610 proved to be the nadir of the colony’s struggle for existence, Virginia barely endured in the ensuing years. The thread that held the ailing colony together was a fortunate choice of governors and the company’s dogged determination to surmount every obstacle to success. In the half-dozen years after 1610 Virginia’s survival was the direct result of the stern government of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale. Gates replaced the sickly Lord De La Warr as governor in 1611. Even before replacing De La Warr, however, he had instituted, at the company’s behest, a series of regulations that subjected the colonists to martial law and discipline. To these regulations Sir Thomas Dale, whom the company had appointed marshal, added additional laws and ordinances. These severe laws, which became known as the Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, following their codification and publication by William Strachey in 1612, were strictly enforced by Dale (Document 9). For all of its severity and strictness, the introduction of the martial law imposed upon the colony a regularity and order that it had never known before Gates’s time.

Besides restoring order to the struggling colony, Gates and Dale expanded the area of settlement, encouraged experimentation with staple crops, and subtly changed the nature of the colonial operation by introducing a degree of private land tenure. While Jamestown was an easy site to defend, its marshy terrain made it an unhealthful place in which to live. This limitation was apparent from the start, but until Dale’s arrival few steps had been taken to locate settlements elsewhere. In a letter to Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury (Document 10), Sir Thomas outlined a pattern for expansion, cut to his understanding of Spanish colonial methods, both as a means of better defense and a chance for utilizing the country’s natural advantages. Shortly after he wrote the letter, Dale won Gates’s approval to erect a new settlement at a place upriver from Jamestown, which he called Henrico, in honor of Henry, prince of Wales. As a result of Dale’s endeavors, by the time he returned to England in 1616 the English had seated plantations on both sides of the James from its mouth to its falls (see Map 1).

With an advantage over the English in both numbers and knowledge of the countryside, the Indians continually posed a threat to the settlers. Relations between the Powhatan chiefdom and the English were always tense, but they worsened into open warfare after Smith’s departure. So it was a matter of some urgency that Gates and Dale should seek to impose peace between the two peoples. An opportunity presented itself when Samuel Argall captured Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas in 1613. Her subsequent marriage to John Rolfe (see Chapter 8) brought the long-sought peace.

Apart from his contribution to peaceable Indian relations, Rolfe played a prominent, if unforeseen, role in shaping the direction of Virginia’s future development. It had been a goal of the Virginia Company to produce staple commodities both to further the national interest and to turn the colony into a profitable venture for its investors. From 1607 onward, with the encouragement of the company and men such as Gates and Dale, the colonists had tried to produce, without measurable success, pitch, tar, potash, wine, and silk. In the course of these endeavors Rolfe began to experiment with tobacco culture. Tobacco was in great demand in England, having been introduced there by Sir Francis Drake in 1586, and a species of the joviall weed grew in Virginia. But the Virginia variety, Nicotiana rustica, bit the tongue, thus being unpalatable to English tastes accustomed to the milder West Indian varieties. Rolfe recognized the inferior quality of the local leaf, and in 1612 he tried raising a West Indian strain, Nicotiana tabacum. Two years later he shipped four hogsheads of tobacco to London, thereby commencing the English colonial tobacco trade and laying the basis for Virginia’s subsequent economic viability. The speed with which the trade grew after 1614 justified Ralph Hamor’s remark that no man had done more than Rolfe to secure the colony’s future (Document 11).

Bewitched by the prospect of riches, rapacious would-be tobacco planters quickly sought to duplicate Rolfe’s success. Within a matter of decades, Virginia would become a land where some colonists could slip the handcuffs of English society and capitalize on the work of others for their own aggrandizement. These planters eventually bulldozed themselves to the top of colonial society, and, as they did, they cursed Virginia with a single-crop economy that relied on bound laborers for its sustenance. Such were also the legacies of John Rolfe.

In the 1610s, however, it remained for the colonists and company officials to convince themselves that the key to success lay in transforming Virginia from a quasi-military outpost into a colony that possessed the attributes of a traditional social order. Necessarily, Rolfe’s successes abetted the introduction of limited private land tenure in Virginia. That change was the first of several steps that ultimately turned a colonial outpost into an agricultural community.

Until 1614, settlers who went to Virginia did so as servants. They were obligated to the company for seven years, during which they worked on company projects and drew their sustenance from a common storehouse. As events proved, this arrangement was conducive to neither hard work nor initiative, and it probably nurtured low morale among the colonists as well. By 1614 the indentures of the original colonists began to expire. Those who chose to remained in the colony as free laborers, and, as more settlers completed their service, the number of free laborers grew. Soon the company allowed Dale to rent out to these colonists three acres of land in return for a month’s service and a donation of corn to the common store. As a sop to those settlers still in company service, Dale gave every servant one month in each year to grow his own food. And to induce families to migrate to Virginia, Sir Thomas offered twelve acres of improved land rent free for one year. Dale’s objective was an increase in food production, but, instead of growing corn, those settlers who obtained private use of the land raised tobacco. This infusion of private tenure paved the way for individual land ownership a few years later.

Throughout the first ten years of Virginia’s existence, company officials strove to keep their colony vital. Undaunted by past failures, these men continued to search for ways to make Virginia self-sustaining and profitable. But fabulous expectations, a paucity of capital, shortages of skilled colonists, and the lack of marketable commodities were ever-present plagues. Within three years of the 1609 reorganization, the company again became hard pressed for cash. In 1612, when the investors secured yet another charter, the most important new provision authorized the creation of a lottery. Armed with rejuvenated hopes and additional funds raised from the sale of lottery tickets, company officials launched another attempt to revivify Virginia. Despite this latest transfusion of capital and men, Virginia, like a crippled albatross, limped along without showing a profit or even a hint of one.

Virginia’s reputation as a deathtrap deterred people from going there, but the chief difficulty with the settlers was their inability to exploit the country’s most abundant resource—the land. Moreover, given the rigors of military discipline and the lack of a familiar social environment, there was little incentive to try. Artisans, craftsmen, gentlemen, and transported felons initially lacked the requisite skills for turning Virginia into a prosperous agricultural community. Only after 1616, when the company declared a promised dividend in land rather than money, did company officials begin to realize that a possible salvation from their difficulties lay in transforming Virginia from a quasi-military outpost into a place that possessed many of the trappings of English society.

The slowness with which company officials came to this realization almost caused them to miss the significance of Rolfe’s experiments with tobacco. Indeed, they were alarmed at the colonists’ palpable eagerness to grow the weed to the exclusion of anything else. Consequently, they sought to limit its growth, until after 1618, when circumstances altered their aversion to it.

At the start of the colony’s second decade, therefore, Virginia and the Virginia Company remained in serious trouble. As a result of land policy, after 1614 settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the settlers grew more restive when in 1616 Samuel Argall reimposed the strict discipline of Sir Thomas Dale’s Lawes. In London the situation was little better, for the company verged on bankruptcy.

Against this background the company launched a new plan to invigorate its Virginia venture. Led by Sir Edwin Sandys, the newly chosen treasurer, the company embarked upon an ambitious course of action aimed at comprehensively reorganizing the entire colonial operation. The plan was embodied in a series of instructions and commissions, the so-called Great Charter of 1618, designed to re-form land tenures, to improve local administration, and to supplant the Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall with English common law and a more representative resident government. In short, the clear intent of the new program was to transplant as much of traditional English social order as conditions in Virginia would allow.

Sandys authorized a newly appointed governor, Sir George Yeardley, to call together a general assembly consisting of himself, a company-appointed council of state, and burgesses elected by the colony’s freemen. (While the original instructions do not exist, Yeardley prepared a copy in 1621 for his successor, Sir Francis Wyatt [Document 12].) This general assembly would meet annually except in cases of emergency, when it could be convened on short notice. It would serve as a court of justice, and the company gave it authority to enact such general rules and ordinances as should seem necessary to effect directives from London or to address local needs. Any of its enactments were subject to a gubernatorial veto and review by the company.

Upon his arrival in Virginia, Yeardley issued a call for the assembly, and on July 3, 1619, it convened in the little church at Jamestown. After taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, the members proceeded to their business. The assembly first considered its members’ qualifications and ejected two, pending clarification of their patents from London. That done, it proceeded to its legislative business. The assembly’s legislative work is divisible into four parts: examining the 1618 instructions to see what changes, if any, were desirable, enacting certain instructions into law, proposing new ordinances, and drafting petitions to the company. Six revisions to the Great Charter were adopted, and the assembly enacted regulations touching on such matters as Indian relations and the price of tobacco. After some criminal cases were resolved, the intemperance of the weather and the falling sick of divers of the Burgesses forced Yeardley on August 4 to prorogue the assembly to the following March.

In spite of the session’s brevity, only five days, this first general assembly had achieved an important beginning. These twenty-seven men (the governor, six councillors, and twenty burgesses) ushered in a new era in colonial government. Although the assembly would undergo modifications and its right to exist would be in jeopardy after the company lost its charter, that first meeting established a singular precedent for the evolution of representative political institutions and self-government in English North America.

The high expectations of 1618 were soon dashed. Reorganization succeeded in streamlining land tenures and local administration and in introducing a more familiar form of government. An advertising campaign and the promise of cheap land swelled the colony’s population to its highest level by the early 1620s. The settling of women, children, and family units, the introduction of customary legal usages, and the advancement of agriculture were hopeful signs. Nevertheless, these changes did little to bail the company out of its underlying distress, because all of Sandys’s schemes for restoring the company’s fiscal health failed.

Sandys’s leadership was itself a source of contention, and, as the company’s financial situation continued to worsen, opposition to Sir Edwin mounted. The crown’s withdrawal of the company lottery in 1621 and the Indian attack on Virginia in 1622 (see Chapter 8) were two blows from which the company never recovered. Loss of the lottery deprived the company of its chief source of operating revenue; without it company officials were hard pressed to keep operations going. The Indians killed some 350 settlers and plunged Virginia into warfare that lasted for a decade. To compound the colonists’ miseries, shortages of food and ammunition developed, and the colony was struck by a debilitating epidemic. These failures destroyed whatever resilience remained in the company’s membership. Factionalism increased: the arguments became so rancorous that the crown intervened to prevent the company from destroying itself. When that tactic failed, James was left with no choice but to seek the company’s destruction. To that end, in November 1623 the crown’s attorney general, Thomas Coventry, brought suit upon a writ of quo warranto to show cause why the charter should not be voided against the company in the Court of King’s Bench. Six months later the court ruled against the company, its charter was seized, and Virginia became England’s first royal colony.

Despite the Virginia Company’s failures as a colonizing agency, it had achieved an important beginning for England’s subsequent colonial enterprise. The company had succeeded in planting a permanent English foothold in North America and thereby provided future colonizers with a wealth of firsthand practical information about America. It had laid the foundation for Virginia’s future economic growth. And most important, perhaps, the company began transplanting English conceptions of social order, law, and government to a new environment. For this reason alone the company period of Virginia history was enormously significant.

Suggested Readings

PRIMARY SOURCES

Bemiss, Samuel M., ed. The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London, with Seven Related Documents: 1606–1621. Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet 4. Williamsburg, Va., 1957.

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). Facsimile. Edited by David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton. 2 vols. Hakluyt Society, extra series, 39. Cambridge, 1965.

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625, 245–278. Original Narratives of Early American History. New York, 1907.

Van Schreeven, William J., and George H. Reese, eds. Proceedings of the General Assembly of Virginia, July 30–August 4, 1619. Jamestown, Va., 1969.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Biographical sketches of figures mentioned in all chapter introductions may be found in the following two reference works.

Kneebone, John T., J. Jefferson Looney, Brent Tarter, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, eds. Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Richmond, Va., 1998–.

Matthew, H. C. G., Brian Harrison, and Peter Goldman, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 63 vols. Oxford, 2004. An online version is also available by subscription.

Andrews, K. R., N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair. The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650. Liverpool, 1978.

Billings, Warren M., John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate. Colonial Virginia: A History, 1–47. White Plains, N.Y., 1984.

Craven, Wesley Frank. Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment. New York, 1932.

Diamond, Sigmund. From Organization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. American Journal of Sociology, LXIII (1957–1958), 457–475.

Horn, James. A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. New York, 2005.

Kelso, William M. Jamestown: The Buried Truth. Charlottesville, Va., 2006.

———, et al. Jamestown Rediscovery. 8 vols. Richmond, Va., 1995–2005.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, ed. America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995.

Quinn, David Beers. England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620. . . . New York, 1974.

Rabb, Theodore K. Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629. Princeton, N.J., 1998.

Ransome, David R. Wives for Virginia, 1621. William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LXVII (1991), 3–18.

Stahle, David W., et al. The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts. Science, CCLXXX (1998), 564–566.

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Virtual Jamestown <http://www.virtualjamestown.org>

Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation <http://www.jamestown-yorktown.state.va.us>

PLATE 2. Seventeenth-Century Ship. Detail from engraving by Simon van de Passe, published in Captain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virgina. . . (London, 1624). The English used this type of vessel in early-seventeenth-century transatlantic voyages. Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia

PRELUDE TO SETTLEMENT

1} The Rationale for Colonization

Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Walter Cope, and Master Waterson, A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia . . . (London, 1610), in Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States . . . (Boston, 1890), I, 339–340.

It is Reserved and onely proper to Divine Wisdome to forsee and ordaine, both the endes and wayes of every action. In humaine prudence it is all [that] can be required, to propose Religious and Noble and Feasable ends; and it can have no absolute assurance, and infalliblenesse in the waies and meanes, which are contingent and various, perhaps equally reasonable, subject to unpresent circumstances and doubtfull events, which ever dignifie or betray the Councell’s from whence they were derived. And the higher the quality, and nature, and more removed from ordinary action (such as those of which we discourse) the more perplexed and misty are the pathes there-unto.

Upon which grounds, We purpose to deliver roundly and clearly, our endes and wayes to the hopeful Plantations begun in Virginia. . . . The Principal and Maine Endes (out of which are easily derived to any meane understanding infinitlesse, and yet great ones) were first to preach and baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of the Gospell, to recover out of the Armes of the Divell, a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt up unto death, in almost invincible ignorance, and to endeavour the fulfilling, and accomplishment of the number of the elect, which shall be gathered from out all corners of the earth; and to add our myte to the Treasury of Heaven, that as we pray for the coming of the Kingdome of Glory, so to expresse in our actions, the same desire, if God, have pleased, to use so weak instruments, to the ripening and consummation thereof.

Secondly, to provide and build up for the publike Honour and Safety of our Gratious King and his Estates (by the favor of our Superiors even in that care) some small Rampier of our owne, in this opportune and general summer of peace, by transplanting the rancknesse and multitude of increase in our people; of which there is left no vent, but age; and evident danger that the number and infinitnesse of them, will out-grow the matter, whereon to worke for their life and sustentation, and shall one infest and become a burthen to another. But by this provision they may be seated as a Bulwarke of defence, in a place of advantage, against a stranger enemy, who shall in great proportion grow rich in treasure, which was exhausted to a lowe estate; and may well indure an increase of his people long wasted with a continual war, and dispersed uses and losses of them: Both which cannot cho[o]se but threaten us, if we consider, and compare the ends, ambitions and practices of our neighbour countries, with our owne.

Lastly, the appearance and assurance of Private commodity to the particular undertakers, by recovering and possessing to themselves a fruitfull land, whence they may furnish and provide this Kingdome, with all such necessities and defects [Copper, Iron, Steel, Timber for ships, yards, masts, cordage, sope ashes (marginal note in original)] under which we labour, and are now enforced to buy, and receive at the curtesie of other Princes, under the burthen of great Customs, and heavy impositions, and at so high rates in trafique, by reason of the great waste of them from whence they are now derived, which threatens almost an impossibility long to recover them, or at least such losse in exchange, as both the Kingdome and Merchant, will be weary of the deerenesse and peril. These being the true, and essential ends of this Plantation. . . .

2} Supplies the Colonists Took to Virginia

Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas His Pilgrimes; Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others (1625) (Glasgow, 1905–1907), XIX, 164–167.

The Inconveniences that have happened to some persons which have transported themselves from England to Virginia, without provisions necessary to sustaine themselves, hath greatly hindered the Progresse of that Noble Plantation: For prevention of the like disorders hereafter, that no man suffer either through ignorance or misinformation; it is thought requisite to publish this short Declaration: wherein is contayned a particular of such necessaries, as either private Families or single persons shall have cause to furnish themselves with, for their better support at their first landing in Virginia; whereby also greater numbers may receive in part directions how to provide themselves.

PLATE 3. Helmet (Cabasset) and Breastplate. Found in contexts dating their presence in the colony to circa 1610. Courtesy of APVA Preservation Virginia

3} The First Settlers

Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631) (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), I, 207–209.

PLATE 4. Pottery Jars and Fishhook. Fort-period (to 1624) artifacts, including an English delftware apothecary jar, French Martincamp flask neck, German crucible, English Borderware candle stick, German Bartmann jug neck, copper scrap, lead cloth seal, lead shot, copper alloy jetton, and iron fishhook. Quotidian utensils, manufactured in a variety of European countries, reached England and then Jamestown through regional trade networks. Courtesy of APVA Preservation Virginia

with diverse others to the number of 105.

4} Instructions from the Virginia Company to the First Settlers, November 1606

Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609, Haklyut Society Publications, 2d Ser., CXXXVI–CXXXVII (Cambridge, 1969), 1, 49–54.

As We Doubt not but you will have especial Care to Observe the Ordinances [the charter] set Down by the Kings Majestie and Delivered unto you under the privy Seal So for your better Directions upon your first Landing we have thought Good to recommend unto your Care these Instructions and articles following. When it Shall please God to Send you on the Coast of Virginia you shall Do your best Endeavour to find out a Safe port in the Entrance of Some navigable River making Choise of Such a one as runneth furthest into the Land. And if you happen to Discover Divers portable Rivers and amongst them anyone that hath two main branches if the Difference be not Great make Choise of that which bendeth most towards the Northwest for that way shall You soonest find the Other Sea. When You have made Choise of the River on which you mean to Settle be not hasty in Landing Your Victual and munitions but first Let Captain Newport Discover how far that River may be found navigable that you may make Election of the Strongest most Fertile and wholesome place for if you make many Removes besides the Loss of time You Shall greatly Spoil your Victuals and Your cask[s] and with Great pain transport it in Small boats. But if you Choose your place so far up as A Bark of fifty tuns will fleet then you may Lay all Your provisions a Shore with Ease and the better Receive the trade of all the Countries about you in the Land and Such A place you may perchance find a hundred miles from the Rivers mouth and the farther up the better for if you sit Down near the Entrance Except it be in Some Island that is Strong by nature. An Enemy that may approach you on Even Ground may Easily pull You Out and if he be Driven to Seek You a hundred miles within the Land in boats you shall from both sides of your River where it is Narrowest So beat them with Your muskets as they shall never be Able to prevail Against You. And to the end that You be not Surprised as the French were in Florida by Melindus and the Spaniard in the same place by the french you shall Do Well to make this Double provision. First Erect a Little Sconce at the Mouth of the River that may Lodge Some ten men With Whom you Shall Leave a Light boat that when any fleet shall be in Sight they may Come with Speed to Give You Warning. Secondly you must in no Case Suffer any of the natural people of the Country to inhabit between You and the Sea Coast for you Cannot Carry Your Selves towards them but they will Grow Discontented with Your habitation and ready to Guide and assist any Nation that Shall Come to invade You and if You neglect this You neglect Your Safety. When You have Discovered as far up the River as you mean to plant Your Selves and Landed your victuals and munitions to the End that Every man may know his Charge you Shall Do well to Divide your Six Score men into three parts whereof one forty of them you may appoint to fortifie and build of which your first work must be your Storehouse for Victual 30 Others you may imploy in preparing your Ground and Sowing your Corn and Roots. The Other ten of these forty you must Leave Centinel at the havens mouth. The Other forty you may imploy for two Months in Discovery of the River above you and on the Contrary [country?] about you which Charge Captain Newport and Captain Gosnold may undertake. Of these forty Discoverers when they Do Espie any high Lands or ills Captain Gosnold may take 20 of the Company to Cross Over the Lands and Carrying half a Dozen pickaxes to try if they Can find any mineral. The Other twenty may go on by River and pitch up boughs upon the Banks Side by which the Other boats Shall follow them by the Same turnings. You may so take with them a Wherry Such as is used here in the Thames by Which you may Send back to the President for supply of munition or any Other want that you may [be?] not Driven to Return for Every Small Defect.

You must Observe if you Can Whether the River on which you Plant Doth Spring out of Mountains or out of Lakes. If it be out of any Lake the passage to the Other Sea will be the more Easy and it is Like Enough that Out of the same Lake you shall find Some Spring which run the Contrary way toward the East India Sea for the Great and famous River of Volga Tan[a]is and Dwina have three heads near joynd and Yet the One falleth into the Caspian Sea the Other into the Euxine Sea and the third into the Polonian Sea. In all Your Passages you must have Great Care not to Offend the naturals if You Can Eschew it and imploy Some few of your Company to trade with them for Corn and all Other lasting Victuals if you [they?] have any and this you must Do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them for not being Sure how your own Seed Corn will prosper the first Year to avoid the Danger of famine use and Endeavour to Store yourselves of the Country Corn. Your Discoverers that passes Over Land with hired Guides must Look well to them that they Slip not from them and for more Assurance let them take a Compass with them and Write Down how far they Go upon Every point of the Compass for that Country having no way nor path if that Your Guides Run from You in the Great Woods or Deserts you Shall hardly Ever find a Passage back. And how Weary Soever your Soldiers be Let them never trust the Country people with the Carriage of their Weapons for

PLATE 5. Mud-and-Stud Dwelling. Line drawing. Archaeological plan and conjectured reconstruction of store-workshop attached to James Fort, probably built after the January 1607/8 fire. Courtesy of APVA Preservation Virginia

if they Run from You with Your Shott which they only fear they will Easily kill them all with their arrows And whensoever any of Yours Shoots before them be sure that they be Chosen out of your best Markesmen for if they See Your Learners miss what they aim at they will think the Weapon not so terrible and thereby will be bould . . . d [?—bould] to Assaillt You. Above all things Do not advertize the killing of any of your men that the Country people may know it if they Perceive they are but Common men and that with the Loss of many of theirs they may Deminish any part of Yours they will make many Adventures upon You if the Country be popalous. You Shall Do well also not to Let them See or know of Your Sick men if you have any which may also Encourage them to many Enterprizes. You must take Especial Care that you Choose a Seat for habitation that Shall not be over burthened with Woods near your town for all the men You have Shall not be able to Cleanse twenty acres in a Year besides that it may Serve for a Covert for Your Enimies round about You neither must You plant in a low and moist place because it will prove unhealthful. You shall Judge of the Good Air by the People for Some part of that Coast where the Lands are Low have their people blear Eyed and with Swollen bellies and Legs but if the naturals be Strong and Clean made it is a true sign of a wholesome Soil. You must take Order to Draw up the Pinnace that is Left with You under your fort and take her Sails and Anchors A Shore all but a Small Kedge [a small anchor] to ride by Least Some ill Disposed Persons Slip away with her. You must take Care that your Marriners that Go for wages Do not marr your trade for those that mind not to inhabite for a Little Gain will Debase the Estimation of Exchange